Trust. We all know it’s an important thing to have in a relationship. But have you ever thought about it with regards to a narrator? Hah. I bet you haven’t. While you might not think that your relationship with a narrator of any piece of writing is that important, when it comes down to the plausibility of the piece, it can make all the difference.
This past summer, I was reading a book called Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie. It’s basically about a man who was born in India at the very minute (on August 15th, 1947), when India and Pakistan split into two countries. The man (then a boy), Saleem, has special powers whereby he can communicate with other children born at the exact time of India’s independence. He calls them Midnight’s Children. The story is being told to the reader by the grown up Saleem, who is recounting and dictating his story to his secretary, Padma. Because of this, we get to hear about his past, but also about what’s going on in his present; he’ll sometimes make sidebars about Padma, or about the room he’s sitting in, things like that.
I was really into this book for the first 250-300 pages. It had a really interesting plot that I couldn’t even imagine coming up with and writing a novel about, and the language was so creative and carefully chosen. The characters, which were many in number, developed at ridiculous rates, and at least once a chapter, or even more often, you would discover some new facet of one or another character’s personality.
This novel was captivating, in almost every way that it could be. It had the foreign setting, the political yet personal plot, and the complex characters, yet around page 250 or so, there came a turning point. Saleem comes down with a fever and is unable to tell Padma his story for a number of weeks. When he does recover enough to start talking again, one of the first things he says is something like this (I can’t find the exact quotation): I’ve begun telling my story again, and it’s so crazy that Padma thinks I’m still feverish, but really I’m completely recovered.
I hadn’t considered Saleem to be an unreliable narrator for the first part of the book, but suddenly, I could imagine this withered and sick looking man lying on a bed. Next to him is a woman who has a notepad and is taking down notes, but who also looks very unsure about the whole satiation. I could see this man ranting and raving about the most ridiculous things, and my reaction to this scene would be, “This dude is still sick. He’s hallucinating. Make him shut up.” It was at this point that I realized that Saleem could totally be making everything up. He could just be talking about whatever he felt like, because let’s face it; no one actually has telepathic powers.
I decided I couldn’t trust Saleem anymore, now that doubt of his reliability had been raised, so I stopped reading the book. I didn’t exactly do it consciously, but I remember reading that part, and I became doubtful, and then I realized that since I could no longer trust the narrator, I was no longer interested in the story.
That experience taught me a lot about the importance of trust; namely the fact that if somebody is feverish and then begins telling you about their telepathic powers, you probably shouldn’t listen to them.
